The Meaning of Form in
Contemporary Innovative Poetry
My academic critical book is now published by Palgrave
Macmillan. This has been a few years in the writing now and a few months in the
production stage. It represents the culmination of my thinking about form, as I
say in the Introductory chapter, and is guided by the opening formulation: ‘Poetry is the investigation of
complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.’ This conjecture guides the theoretical
accounts of form and the readings of (mainly British) contemporary poetry that
follow in its chapters. The pun upon ‘means’ is intended to enact the
supposition that if poetry does anything it does it chiefly through its formal
power and less through its content, though it also carries the further
suggestion that form is a modality of meaning in its own right.
This study engages questions relating to the life of form in
contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest
theories of form that will be of interest to anyone concerned with reading for
form, not just innovative poets and their readers, and which focusses upon form as an engaged action rather than metrical
frame or pattern, and with reference to the work of Susan Wolfson and Derek
Attridge, Angela Leighton and Peter de Bolla. Close readings of leading North
American and British innovative poets, from Rosmarie Waldrop to Caroline
Bergvall, Sean Bonney to Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson to Kenneth
Goldsmith, Peter Hughes to Stefan Themerson, Allen Fisher to Geraldine Monk, emphasise their forms to be a matter
of authorial design and readerly engagement. They cover form on the page, form
in performance, and form in physical book-making. The book ends with a
consideration of what has been implicit throughout: the politically critical
function of formal innovation, mediated through the theories of Adorno, Rancière
and others, and something that haunts throughout, the thought that form is
cognitive, is brought to a tentative conclusion.
How does
this fit in with previous studies I’ve written? They have demonstrated these
various ‘turns’, though not I hope in any programmatic way: the linguistic turn
of Far Language (1999); the ethical
turn of The Poetry of Saying: BritishPoetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000 (2005); and the historical turn of When
Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (2011);
though throughout there has been a concern for poetics as a speculative
writerly discourse (although I never quite realized the project of writing a
whole book on poetics: the possible chapters are scattered through other books,
including The Meaning of Form), but
see here for the first part of my main essay on the subject). Yet at another
level I see these works forming a unity in terms of my larger project of the
study of the forms and poetics of British (and associated) writing of an
avant-garde persuasion. (See here for my recent thoughts on the connection
between critical work, poetics production and creative practice.)
I am glad
that it joins The Poetry of Saying as
critical work of a strictly academic turn, although I am glad that overlapping
essays in Far Language and When
Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, books which are within the reach
of the average poetic pocket, are still available. People sometimes
misunderstand the nature of academic publication, about which I have some severe
reservations (which I might share on this blog, but which I will limit on what
is a bit of a celebratory occasion to the remark that this is to be my last
purely academic book), but the fact is they are intended for scholars who have
access to academic libraries and inter-library loan. (The demand for open
access might change all that.) My answer to this imposed exclusivity has been
to show the ‘working out’ of some of the chapters and parts of chapters (along
with digressions, caprices, poetic effusions and – frankly – jokes) in posts on
this blog, and they are arranged, for scholar and lay-person alike, at what I
call a ‘hub-post’, i.e., largely a page of links to all the posts
pertaining to the chapters of the book in its earliest form: HERE.
For the
record, the chapters of the final book are as below, and I’m going to link one a day
to the abstracts of each that I plan to post over the coming days. About half of it accounted for by now.
Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming (see here)
1. Veronica
Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice (see here)
2. Convention and Constraint: Form in the
Innovative Sonnet Sequence (see here)
3.
Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Hughes’ Petrarch (see here)
4. Meddling
the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure (see here)
5. Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and
Sean Bonney (see here)
6. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest
Prose (see here)
7. The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic:
Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed (see here)
8. Stefan
Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry (here)
9. The
Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher (see here, where else?)
10. Geraldine
Monk’s Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act (see here)
11. Form and
the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs (see here)
For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries,
here are the places to go to:
Here is some book data:
eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9
